the warmth on the mountain
by MissPixel
Summary: In the summer of the 87th Olympiad, Brasidas of Sparta comes home from a long, cold campaign in Attica, sagging under the weight of secrets hoarded and lives taken in service of his kings. This is the upside of being a spy: there is little danger of them knowing the truth, which is that he is tired, sore, and heartsick.
1. nostos

chapter 1: nostos

In the summer of the 87th Olympiad, Brasidas of Sparta comes home from a long, cold campaign in Attica, sagging under the weight of secrets hoarded and lives taken in service of his kings.

He is happy to do this work. He's helping to win the war, preserving his customs and the lives of his people. He is the aegis that guards against the creeping danger of Athenian dominance over the waters that carry Spartan trade and culture to distant shores. With this refrain in mind, he is able to meet his welcoming party with a broad smile and warm embraces, oppressively and perfectly cheerful.

This is the upside of being a spy: there is little danger of them knowing the truth, which is that he is tired, sore, and heartsick.

Mercifully, he's arrived just a few months in advance of the Hyakinthia - a festival honoring the death and rebirth of Apollo's mortal lover that will transform the stern straight lines of his home city into a mosaic of art, flowers and decorated caravans. Before long, soldiers will leave the front and come home to celebrate. Goats will be slaughtered to please the gods, and young men and women will dance and race nude in the streets in euphoria.

Brasidas needs this very badly. He has just spent half a year outside the valley of Lakonia, where the connections between people matter more than the glory of a courageous death. Now, he needs to be inoculated back into Spartan society _slowly_ , with wine and laughter - not with the skulls of infants at the foot of Taygetos, the shadows of _krypteia_ as they open the throats of rebellious slaves, the wet cries of boys dying in the training arena before they can so much as dream of a battlefield.

He's careful to keep that thought folded neatly inside himself when he makes his reports to the diarchs. As usual, Archidamos is pleased with him; Pausanias is thin-lipped and smiles with practiced politesse. _As usual_.

Brasidas reclaims his apartment in the heart of the city, resumes his seat at the war council among the ephors and generals that will one day be his peers, and waits to feel at home again.

The first day of the Hyakinthia passes without incident. Brasidas drinks with friends he hasn't seen in seasons, and watches the footraces, and puts flowers in the hair of all the dancers that pass their banquet table.

It's strange to exist in the open after so long without a name. It's strange to enjoy the taste of wine, even the good rich stuff from Chios, and allow it to dull his mind (he takes his neat now, like a Macedonian, inviting a scandalous delight from his companions). And the feel of the _chiton_ , tied with practiced carelessness over one shoulder and exposing too much vulnerable flesh, is foreign and uncomfortable after months in stiff leather armor -

But this is all part of it, isn't it? The slow, painful reacclimation to a cast that seems suddenly to not fit as well as it once did.

At sundown on the second day of the festival, a ghost of Sparta's past comes back from the dead.

It's been twenty years since anyone saw Myrrine or her children in Lakonia, but the wound of her leaving is still fresh. Brasidas himself remembers being in the peak of his training at the _agoge_ the night she fled the city. As difficult as it was to care about the drama of elites while surrounded by the stink of sweat and hard work and weakness being scrubbed away, the web of scandal was impossible to escape.

 _The name of Leonidas, savior of Hellas and the last true Greek hero, is tarnished,_ it whispered.

 _His daughter has run away like a coward, and his grandchildren have perished on Taygetos._

 _The line is ended. The blood of the warrior king will fade into obscurity._

Only, it hasn't. When Myrrine appears without warning or fanfare at the palace of the kings, dressed in corsair's rags with her chin pointed high and a web of leathery scars displayed like trophies from a bitter violent life, all of Sparta seems to drop its flowers and its amphorae and look at her.

But Brasidas is not looking at Myrrine. Brasidas is looking at the woman beside her.

Kassandra's measured frown breaks into a great beaming smile when she sees him.

"Brasidas!" she calls. "Brasidas, do you remember me?"

The question is so absurd that he almost laughs in her face.


	2. khoros

chapter 2: khoros

In the days following Kassandra's arrival, Brasidas's mood improves dramatically. Not because he is working with or even talking to her, because there never seems to be time - but because she has caused a near-existential confusion in the generals of Sparta.

The reason is this:

Nominally, _politeia_ law embraces the parity of the genders. Childbirth is not dissimilar to warfare, and so the value of men and women to society is considered roughly equivalent (a notion that, from what Brasidas has seen during his travels, perplexes most of Greece). Though a woman cannot enter the agoge or hold political office, she administers the wealth and property of her household, speaks in public forum, and is expected to run, wrestle, and throw with the best of her brothers. She is the protector of their homeland and economy when her husband goes abroad; her strength and his are coupled. A man who cannot recognize a woman as his equal is no man at all, they like to say.

And yet, the fact that Kassandra so hopelessly baffles their attempts to classify her proves that the kinks have not exactly been worked out.

"It's not what I was expecting," she says to him one day as they pass each other outside the palace - him going in, her coming out. "This is the city that produced my mother, and her mother Queen Gorgo. A woman that wields iron and wins battles should be no shock."

Before he can reply, one of the ephors rushes him away, admonishing him for keeping the kings waiting.

A lingering sense of dismay follows him into the palace: if this is the reception Kassandra gets from a nation that claims to recognize her power, what indignities must she have endured outside it? In Athens, or even Euboeia or Megaris, where they would see her as nothing more than a body in need of a master?

When Brasidas reaches the throne room, the kings are in the middle of a hushed argument. Their backs are turned, but he can hear them whispering ferociously, can see the cloth of their _chitons_ pull and tauten with every vigorous gesture. Every so often, Pausanias's hand flies up to grip Archidamos's shoulder in his patronizing, I-hear-you-but way.

Brasidas stands patiently with his hands clasped behind his back, and waits for them to be done. He feels certain this is about to become his problem.

The exile has applied for citizenship, the kings finally tell him with paralyzed bewilderment, and he almost asks who they're talking about before realizing, _oh_. She is disinherited, yet she wants her rightful lands and ownership of her family home - which Brasidas thinks (but does not say) is a fair demand. His new assignment is, quite simply, to explain her to them - to draw the contexts and parallels they need to either give her a role in Spartan society, or reject her from it.

He wonders how long it will take them to realize that there are no parallels.

Eventually, the generals invite Kassandra to demonstrate at the _agoge_.

This is half a display of respect for her accomplishments in battle and half a thinly veiled effort to quantify her. She does them no favors by arriving in a burnished bronze cuirass, a rough-wrought male body that mercilessly interrupts the long arched lines of her neck and the dimpled muscles of her bare brown thighs.

Brasidas volunteers for the first bout. Whether she wins or loses, holding her own in combat with one of Sparta's favored warriors will elevate her in the eyes of the kings. Plus, having already studied her during their brief collaboration in Korinthia, he feels he knows what to expect.

Kassandra waits politely for him to assume his own stance before drawing her weapons and falling into a shallow crouch, gravity low and weighted forward, favoring aggression over defense. Her torso angles forward, trimming her width to present a smaller target. Slowly, she sways to find her best balance on unfamiliar terrain. As he first observed in the burning warehouse so many months ago, she holds her _xiphos_ unusually - directly in front of her, waist-high and parallel with her shoulders - and keeps the broken spearhead behind her back to hide its intent.

Hand to Athena, Brasidas could just stand here and watch her move! These small ceremonies are hypnotic: hundreds of quiet physical calculations to prepare for a burst of motion. Her control of her body is complete; every part of her at rest except for the ones she means to use. Watching the muscles come alive in deliberate groups might be distracting, if he had any time to look.

Too late, he feels iron on his throat, and the heat of a body at his back. A sharp, involuntary breath of surprise presses the tip of her spear - which is resting almost casually against his side, between his ribs - into the cloth of his armor.

The generals are staring at each other, astonished. Their voices are stuck in their throats.

Kassandra steps back. Another chance.

But, is it a chance? Brasidas hesitates while lifting his spear again to the rim of his shield - reliving the moment over and over and trying to understand, realistically, if there's anything he could have done.

She lunges to his left, attempting to duck under his shield arm, and this time he's ready - readier, at least. He angles his body, cutting off the opening, and slams the haft of his spear forward into her neck -

Or would, if she were still there.

Fuck! He can't give up a second bout as quickly as the first. Even if he loses again - and at this point, expecting anything else would be willful ignorance - it needs to be substantial, believable. Otherwise, it will look ridiculous. No one will believe what they've seen; they'll think he's thrown the match, or that she's cheating, and then this entire exercise will do nothing for her.

 _Think_ , he commands himself in a daze. Last time, she got behind him and the _xiphos_ came around the right side of his neck, so this time…

Brasidas slams his elbow backwards, a wild and desperate guess, and strikes a hard pad of gut-flesh. His heart jumps, and he uses the momentum to pivot, bringing the spear around in the tightest arc he can manage, swinging the point low in an effort to knock Kassandra's legs from under her.

She shifts her weight ever so slightly, without a shred of superfluous effort, and the speartip breathes past her shins.

He's too low now, overextended and off-balance, so he angles his shield to protect from the counterattack before bringing it up towards her chin in a vicious backhand swing. She redirects the force, batting it aside with the flat of the xiphos like a boxer turning a jab.

Brasidas takes a few steps back, scrambling for distance. Absolute madness - he's breathless and aching from exertion, yet there she is, perfectly still in her steady crouch with her chest barely moving, a statue in contrapose. But her hair's mussed, and she looks surprised, and that's a victory, at least.

Then - and it's the belated nature of the action that makes it sting so much, as if it were just an afterthought - she hooks her foot forward around his calf and yanks his weight from under him. He goes down instantly in a graceless topple, cracking the back of his skull against the sand, tasting copper and hearing his own ragged groan as the air comes out of him like a bellows.

This, he thinks as he lays there and concentrates on breathing, is why Kassandra's enemies are so good at hiding. This is why they cower behind masks and cryptonyms, and work through proxies and dead drops and impenetrable ciphers. Without the shadows, they would have to face her on equal footing, and there is no such thing.

The sound of sandals crunching on shale brings him back to the agoge , and to his budding headache. Kassandra is standing over him, an anonymous black shape against the midday sun - but then she leans down and blocks out the corona that's been blinding him, and he gets a good look at her face.

Honey eyes wide and wet. Brows knitted, lips pressed thin, dimpled as if she's chewing on the inside of her cheek. Terror.

Brasidas's heart skips, leaving a painful thumping vacuum in his chest - why? His mind races; does she think she's hurt him? No, that's not it. Her hand is out, extended palm-up towards him, but she's not rushing to help, so she must know he's fine. So then -

Kasandra bends lower, opens her hand further - take it, please take it - and the neediness of it is utterly dissonant.

With a jolt, Brasidas realizes what she's asking:

 _Don't recoil. Don't shrink from me._

 _Touch me, please._ _Show me you still can, because enough people fear me, enough…_

He takes her arm too quickly, just as she was too quick to offer it. A brief exchange of anxieties that, though it can't have lasted more than five seconds, has taught him more than he feels he has a right to know. With a characteristic lack of effort, Kassandra hauls him to his feet and holds on just a little too long - and then people are approaching the dais and her warmth is gone, and no one but Brasidas will ever know she was afraid.

There are a few halfhearted quips in the aftermath, about how Brasidas is getting soft in his old age or what they must put in the water in Kephallonia, but there's no bite to it. Tonight, the generals will go home and gossip to their wives in drunken awe, and the children will break curfew to play-act their favorite new legend with short swords held before them and broken spears behind their backs.

One small part of Sparta, at least, is won.


	3. pistis

chapter 3: pistis

Ask any Athenian to describe the diarchs of Sparta, and they will say "tyrants."

Brasidas can see how this error began. Archidamos and Pausanias are styled king, after all, a word that carries a sense of cruelty and jealous control. And the misconception serves their enemies well: in the same way that Sparta sneers at the Athenian obsession with debate and rhetoric, Athens uses moral superiority to fuel its propaganda. If democracy is good, and diarchy evil, then war becomes a righteous vehicle rather than a pointless bloody competition for water routes.

The truth is that the kings are far from all-powerful. They bend to each other, and to the ephors, and to any reasonable swell of public opinion. Where a king of old might seclude himself in his palace to rule alone, the diarchs know this behavior will invite murmurs of detachment and corruption - so they open the gates and invite citizens to hear and question their decisions.

It's clear that the kings are beginning to regret this precedent. While Myrrine grew up a daughter of Sparta and still has some respect for its adamantine political hierarchy, her daughter has shown no such loyalty.

For what feels like the sixth time in half as many weeks, Brasidas stands in the throne room and watches Kassandra hurl abuse at King Archidamos.

An aura of celebrity clings to her like pitch-fire. For the last twenty years, Sparta has known her as a dead child, the tragic inheritor of Leonidas's blood, but now she is real, and the city is beside itself with the thrill. First there was her barely-a-duel with Brasidas, and then a roaring victory on the battlefield at Boeotia. Every week, she returns from another of the kings' suicide missions with the head of an Athenian commander. Attendance at palace forums has swollen like a river gorged on meltwater, all for the chance to watch the lost princess of Sparta pull down her loincloth and piss on the city foolish enough to think she could be forgotten.

She's not a citizen, of course, and has no legal right to be here, but Brasidas would very much like to see anyone try to throw her out.

"Old fool!" she thunders. "The world does not stand still while you tend to your ill-kept house. Spartans are dying in Messara, and you want to keep your _krypteia_ \- the best of your men - in the city to kill slaves?"

Archidamos has no idea what to do. Pausanias, who has always been better at managing her, is away at the front, and for all his bravado, the older king looks small and lost.

The ephors attempt to help. A helot rebellion could be the end of Sparta, they start to say, but Kassandra is not looking for feedback.

"I've seen you settle your disagreements with a spar. Fight me for this, king. Maybe a blow to your head will set it straight!"

What could any of them do to stop her? The room is paralyzed; their society is based on loyalty, obedience, recognition of authority even when it may not have been fairly earned. No one has thought about what might happen if someone came here and decided they simply didn't care .

From his spot behind Archidamos, Brasidas fixes her with a hard stare.

Look at me, Kassandra. Look, before you cause more damage.

When she meets his eyes, magnificent in her leather and bronze and bitter fury, he flicks his gaze to the king, and back. Shakes his head. Wills her to understand that she is an axe in the foundations, a wound in the room; that all of Sparta is about to come tumbling down. A titan cannot stomp about so carelessly.

Her brow softens. Amidst a suffocating silence, she turns around and walks away.

Brasidas watches her leave, fixed on the movement of her hips and the nautilus whorl of her braid. For once, he doesn't have to hide his staring, because everyone else is staring too.

When Brasidas leaves the palace a few hours later, Kassandra flags him down with a hushed call and asks him to walk with her.

They chat idly as they make the short trek to Pitana, the northwest village, past flowering almond trees and furrowed fields and makeshift gates of wood and red cloth. Temples give way to olive orchards; citizens in red-gold tunics to helots in animal skin. The sun is beginning to set over Taygetos, jabbing splinters of wine-colored light through its crags and canyons.

Brasidas's stomach churns the whole way. He is acutely aware of the closeness of their walking, and that Kassandra has shed her armor for a loose-tied _peplos_ that billows and bunches at her thighs when she walks, and that they are alone.

The problem is not that he's attracted to her; he's known that since Korinthia. He has accepted it, come to live with it. He thinks of it in the same breath as hunger or fatigue. But that acceptance is contingent on her disinterest, and every step they take sets his thoughts circling each other like restless wolves: what is this, what is changing, where do I look, what do I say what do I -

Their hike ends at a ledge overlooking the valley of Lakonia, shaded by the thick arms and weeping leaves of an olive tree. Blissfully unaware of how intently she's being watched, Kassandra smooths her dress, motions for Brasidas to sit by her on the cliff, and - smile fading - hands him a yellowed scrap of papyros.

A chill rises in him as he reads it. Unwillingly, he understands the secrecy, the long walk from the palace - even the _peplos_ , which is not a signal but a disguise, meant to help them leave the city unnoticed.

Kassandra has brought him here to tell him, in the gentlest way she knows how, that one of his kings is a traitor.

His mind contorts in search of excuses. It's a mistake, has to be. A word or phrase miswritten or misread - but no, send Brasidas back to Sparta on his shield, that's fairly fucking clear. He's still alive, so something hasn't gone to plan, but he can't help wondering if the same would be true if Kassandra had not been hunting spies in Korinth last autumn.

Brasidas feels like a fool for so many reasons. He has always considered his loyalty to his leaders a point of pride - the depth and candor of it, and how he gives it without question - but now, it makes his ears burn with shame. And to think of the juvenile thrum of his heart in his throat when he thought Kassandra was leading him here for something else, and how unimportant that seems now…

"Which one?" she asks.

He opens his mouth to say Pausanias, no question: the smaller king with his thin smile and unctuous tone, speaking to him like being slathered in butter. It's almost too obvious. His recent rulings against some of Sparta's ancient criminal laws have made him unpopular, provoking the ephors to call him a poor leader at best and a cultural traitor at worst.

But, Brasidas forces himself to admit, wouldn't they say the same of him, if he were less discreet about his own opinions? If they knew he thinks _krypteia_ are murderous filth, or that an economy predicated on slave labor is fragile and unsustainable, or that Sparta's willingness to sacrifice sons for glory will be its destruction?

Or, for gods' sakes, that Kassandra should be allowed to have her fucking house back?

"I don't know," he says honestly.

Kassandra nods and looks ahead at Athena's temple, red and sun-washed in the distance. They sit in silence as the last of the clouds loses its golden belly and sinks into night.

It's hard to tell how much time passes without the sun to watch - thirty minutes, two hours. He spends it digging back through matted clumps of memory, wanting to help, but so much is missing. Moments unnoticed, whispers unheard, each of which could have been evidence that this was the traitor-king who would someday trap Sparta in an unwinnable war and order Brasidas's murder.

But there's nothing. Forearms gripped, smiles exchanged, orders given and taken, all without a hint of treason.

He feels oddly calm, despite it all. He's still bounding from one emotion to another, furious one moment and paranoid the next, but in the end, it's impossible to feel unsafe sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Kassandra. Even unarmed and in citizen's garb, betrayed only by the beauty she cannot hide, her strength coils in her like a sleeping caldera.

"Why show this to me?" The letter dangles between Brasidas's knees, wax seal folded inward. "Telling the secret weakens its power. You could have used this for leverage."

Kassandra sighs deeply, rolling her shoulders back: the first breath after a long silence.

"I considered it," she says. "Using your ignorance, dangling the secret for the ephors to find. I could have waited for the traitor-king to lose his nerve and pay me for silence - or silence me himself."

"Try to silence you," Brasidas amends, and Kassandra hides her smile in the knot of her dress. "No, neither king would dare. They've missed their chance now; you're too public. Woven into the city like the leather in your hair. Sparta would unravel in their hands."

She contemplates her dangling feet. "I know I could be subtler."

"No, no," he says quickly, "that's not my point. I have seen fame save more lives than invisibility. A spy discovered is easily killed, but if the world knows your name - if people love you, and will notice your absence - then your enemies are powerless. They cannot touch you."

"Or, at least," Kassandra says with a sharklike grin, "they will think twice about it."

"You haven't answered my question."

The smile falters. She hesitates, lips parted with an answer half-formed.

Tell me you want me safe, Brasidas thinks into the silence. Tell me you were afraid of what the traitor-king might do to me. Tell me you couldn't bear the thought.

"I need allies," she says at last. "And this - "

Kassandra puts a hand out to touch the frayed edge of the letter, which means reaching over Brasidas's knee, which means he has to try very hard to focus on what she's saying. "This makes me think you could be one."

She takes the papyros from him, folding it into the rope cinching the waist of her _peplos_ , and then - so quietly, so naturally that he barely notices - reaches back to lace their fingers together. Holding him firmly, a blood-brothers' grip, she brings their clasped hands up between them: his strength and hers, linked by the threat on their city and his life.

"I want to trust you, Brasidas. And I would like it if you trusted me."

Her dark honey eyes are intense, concealing nothing. She speaks as if words are a nuisance, a barrier, as if she wants to inject her meaning into his blood. His mind is scrambled with the intimacy of a word like trust: deeper and more suggestive than anything he could have imagined during their walk to Pitana this morning.

"I do." He says it so quickly that she laughs, high and honest. The sound drives a shiver through him. "I trust you, Kassandra. Of course I do."

"Good," she breathes, and finally - finally - the smile reaches her eyes. "Good."


	4. aspis

chapter 4: aspis

If unmasking the traitor-king of Sparta is a game, then the pieces are made of knowledge and discretion.

Kassandra has already forfeited the first round. As Brasidas suspected, her behavior at the palace forums is more than frustration at a mismanaged war effort; it's an interrogation. She's been testing the diarchs' reflexes, searching for clues in the way they bring up their shields to deflect her daggers.

So far, the trade has been uneven. She's exposed her intentions but gained no knowledge in return, and every new challenge only improves the traitor-king's acting.

But now they have an edge: as cautious as their quarry might be with a hunter who stalks him in the open, he still believes Brasidas to be passive and oblivious - a _petteia_ stone to be moved and sacrificed for the greatest gain.

And a stone is not expected to fight back.

"Wait, wait," Kassandra says, laughter in her voice as she catches his wild hands in a woefully misguided attempt to calm him down. "We must be defensive. Find the gaps in his armor, and strike only when it's safe."

Such a wondrous thing they hold between them, this secret. It would be so easy to wash away in its tide. "Remember what we stand to lose, Brasidas."

She's right. Despite the traitor-king's litany of advantages - reach, resources, and a vast network of agents yet hidden from them - his greatest power is that he holds all of Sparta hostage.

It's not enough to expose him. They must catch his body as it falls and lay it gently in the dust, or the city will fall with him.

* * *

Brasidas's spies report that Athenian triremes are being loaded for battle. In less than a month, a hundred ships swollen with wine, weapons, and hoplites will arrive at the port-town of Methone, on the southern tip of Peloponnese, to challenge Sparta's borders.

As agreed, the news goes to Kassandra before it goes anywhere else.

She sprawls in the lamplight and studies the vellum map strung across the wall of Brasidas's apartment, flower-dyed into neat red and blue blotches. They've stuck bits of clay on it to mark Sparta's camps and commanders - clustered on the mainland, pointed towards Athens in a tight semicircle.

"A poisoned battle," she says, chewing her lip. "The generals are months away, holding the front in Attika. They'll never arrive in time."

She turns to him, bronze skin half-lit, with oil-fire dancing in her eyes. The thrill of a scheme discovered - the first step towards fighting back. "I think Sparta is meant to lose Methone."

Out of this hypothesis, a plan forms.

Even if the traitor-king wants Methone ceded to Athens, it's too important a foothold in the peninsula for the other king to let it go quietly. With the generals away, Brasidas - unlaureled, but trusted and popular - is well within his rights to claim commandership of the defense force.

Kassandra will feign disinterest and take a mercenary contract in Argolis. She'll dawdle while supplying, just long enough for the kings to hear of her plans. The spies will stick to her like stinging nettles when she leaves the city, and as soon as she can catch and kill them, she will turn around and ride south.

There, with Brasidas the fresh lure and Kassandra the hook buried within, they will wait for the traitor-king to make a mistake.

* * *

At first light, Brasidas petitions the kings for the relief of Methone.

Voice booming, face schooled into a soldier's mask, he asks to lead a hundred hoplites to the south, with helots to carry their provisions and a detachment of mounted _skiritai_ to scout their path. Sparta's navy is no match for Athenian oarsmen with their precise rowing and ramming, so Brasidas will challenge them on the shore.

The performance is watertight, he knows it is, but still his heart beats fast and wild against his windpipe. He watches the kings, looking for the first faltered smile, the first stammer or hand raised in protest: which one will refuse? Which one will be the first to suggest, with a heavy heart, that Methone cannot be saved?

Archidamos and Pausanias both approve his proposal instantly.

Off balance, Brasidas barks his gratitude and dips into a stiff bow, barely holding onto his helmet. He feels every bit like the part he's playing. The traitor-king has obviously seen this coming: seen, sidestepped, and made a plan.

Fine. He and Kassandra have made their own.

Brasidas's lean army makes the journey in four days - the red of their cloaks a raw gash in the hills, in the cooling winter air. The earth rattles with their steps, heavy with weapons and armor, synchronized by the dry, bending tones of the _outi_ players and their war songs.

Despite his counterfeit bravery at the palace, he feels a grinding unease.

They planned to meet once before departing, he and Kassandra, but with his proposal so hastily accepted, there was no time. He has no idea where she is - if she's riding towards or away from him, or whether she managed to leave the city at all. And to make matters worse, his own inexperience haunts him like a badly knit scar; he's never commanded this many men, and every time he rides out to check their marching order, the scale of it spins his head with vertigo.

A hundred crimson cloaks. A hundred brittle breastplates holding the lives of his brothers. And countless more will be lost if his phalanxes fall: the helots, the _skiritai_ , the physicians, the fishers and farmers of Messenia who are counting on him to rebuff Athens -

A long, shaky breath - private, with his back to his men. Nothing for it. Whether or not Kassandra comes, Brasidas has a duty to survive, and to win.

A week passes on the shore, then two. The army camps, forages, eats, and trains: running in place, keeping itself hammered and sharp for a lightning-strike of combat. Brasidas exchanges letters with the ephors in Sparta and the generals in Attika, body humming alternately with nerves and thrill and longing. Armed with spyglasses and nautical charts, his runner-agents ride up and down the coast in a tight relay and describe to him the Athenian fleet's agonizing progress around the peninsula.

Then, at the end of the third week, he sees her.

It's barely a blink of movement, red and bronze through the long leaves of an olive grove, but the sense of knowing is unmistakable. He recognizes the way she moves, the way she would move if she wanted to be discreet - showing herself long enough for him to notice her, brief enough for him to doubt he's seen anything at all.

That night, he lights an oil-lamp to cast his shadow against the canvas wall of his tent, and pretends to write a letter.

" _Brasidas_."

The sound of his name, hissed softly through a blanket of night waves and seabirds, melts the tension from his shoulders. Three weeks apart has been harder than he would like.

"It's good to see you, Kassandra," he murmurs, and corrects himself with a chuckle: "Hear you, at least."

"I sound better than I look," she says, as if such a thing could be true. "I've been riding for two days."

"Did something happen?"

"There was trouble leaving the city. The kings tried to keep me."

Brasidas can't help a short, harsh swell of laughter. "What? After months trying to get you out of Sparta, now they want you to stay?"

She scoffs quietly, which makes him smile. If he concentrates, he can almost see the outline of her half-crouch against the tent wall, and the pads of her fingers where she's resting her hand on the fabric.

"How far are they?" she whispers. "The Athenians."

"Another week, my reports say. They left Piraeus behind schedule, and the winds have been unfavorable."

A relieved sigh: "Good, that's good - we have time. If the traitor-king moves against you, it will be late, at the last moment possible, so that…"

 _So that your death will have the greatest impact._ The sentence doesn't need finishing.

"Never mind that," Kassandra says softly. "Be with your men. Go, before someone catches you here smiling at your inkwell."

"Wait - " He feels a sudden looming emptiness, indulges the childish impulse to keep her here even though each moment is another chance for their plan to come to ruin. "Wait. Where will you be?"

"Near."

Then she's gone, and the tent is cold again.

He doesn't see her for days, and as the battle approaches and his men begin to slam their shields and bray for Athenian blood, he wonders if there is any threat at all.

Has she been spotted? It's possible - despite her care in staying hidden, and his (admirable, he thinks) refusal to let his eyes wander openly in search of her, they have no way of knowing what the agents of the traitor-king have or have not seen. Or perhaps the trap has been detected some other way: even if Kassandra has laid a hundred false trails to the north, there are many ways to find out that she is not doing mercenary work in Argolis.

Maybe, he thinks abruptly, there was never any agent. Maybe the traitor-king is simply waiting for him to fall in battle. Another dead son, stretchered on the shield that failed to save him while his mother thanks the gods for the honor he's brought her.

The night before the Athenians make their landing, Kassandra catches a black-cloaked spy coiled in the crossbeam of Brasidas's tent.

The whole thing only takes a few heartbeats. She throws the woman down from the rafters to the war table, interrupting his meeting in the most appalling way - leaping down after her, pinning her, slitting her from groin to sternum and spilling the pink ropes of her intestines across the sheepskin map.

The men bellow in shock and knock over their stools in frenzied disgust. Blood and bowels wash Brasidas's wooden pawns to the ground. The ivory-hilted kopis that would have opened his throat clatters at his feet.

Kassandra is the only stillness in the chaos she's caused, in the raw quicklime explosion of shouts and swears and weapons drawn in panic. With a shudder that seems to take her from neck to spine to the balls of her feet, she settles back on her haunches, straddling the twitching hips of his almost-murderer. Hands on her thighs, eyes half-lidded with an emotion Brasidas wishes he understood, she tilts her head back and breathes as if the world has been lifted from her chest.

* * *

At last, having calmed the captains and instructed the helots to save as much of the map as they can, Brasidas leaves the war tent.

He half expected Kassandra to be gone again, but she's standing a little ways off with her back turned, instantly recognizable by her braid and her cuirass and the impossible geometry of her bare shoulders. He follows her gaze out to sea, where half a dozen dim orange lights quaver gently on the horizon.

The fleet is here. With a deep lurch, Brasidas remembers that in less than ten hours, he is expected to lead a hundred soldiers to victory or death.

Kassandra turns around as he approaches. She hasn't gotten a chance to wash, and there's a thick, eerie red slash across her nose and mouth where the assassin spat blood in her face.

He's imagined this reunion for the last month - planned out what he would say, how he would laugh and embrace her and celebrate the end of their long separation, the success of their gambit - but in the moment, he finds that all he can do is take her proffered forearm and hold it tightly as the words fail to come.

How many times has she done this, he wonders? Stood quietly between him and an unmarked grave, looked placidly at him moments after, and said nothing?

When Kassandra finally speaks, her voice is rough and cracked with disuse, and the most wonderful thing he's ever heard.

"I won't field tomorrow."

Brasidas feels his eyebrows go up in surprise. Too late to feign indifference. It's never occurred to him that Kassandra might not want to take part in the fight for Methone.

"Why?" he asks - but as the word comes out, he thinks he might know. Kassandra has already won her battle: one of baited hooks, of black-clad women and their poisoned daggers. This - a matter of nations, of simple glory and a soldier's duty to his people - is his.

But Kassandra has a different answer:

"Because I will dilute your glory."

She says it plainly: not a boast but a fact, carefully considered. He doesn't understand, and it must show on his face, because she sighs and continues: "In Sparta, they are beginning to talk. They are looking at me a different way, calling me things I am not. Titan, demigod - "

It's true, he realizes. A fresh memory comes into his head: fearful whispers exchanged in low tones among his own captains, just moments ago as he left his war tent painted with her destruction.

"They're cheap words," she says softly, "They cost nothing to say, but they have an echo. If I am with you on the beach, those words will eclipse the truth."

"And what is the truth?"

"That you will win."

Hearing it raises gooseflesh on his neck. Such a simple thing, but her tone is steady and warm, with a calm finality that makes it sound like it's already happened. A swell of affection - real, terrifying - threatens to swallow him.

"What Brasidas of Sparta does for Methone tomorrow, he does by his own valor," she says. "And his victory will have its own echo."

* * *

Arranged on white sand like a line of bronze shells glinting in dawnlight, Brasidas and his hoplites stand face-to-face with what any other army would call death.

They are outnumbered, as he knew they would be - three Athenians at least for every Spartan. More wait just asea, stamping their spears on the hollow decks of their triremes.

No one rides out. No emissaries seeking settlement; no war party requesting a peaceful surrender. Perhaps they think a force this small is not worth the horses.

Standing alone before his army, Brasidas sets his feet apart and draws himself up to full height. He slams the haft of his spear into the thick plate of shale underfoot on the rocky shore, chosen to resonate, and bellows:

"LEAVE."

Even in the cushion of thick sea air and crashing surf, his voice carries. A cluster of seabirds chitters in their departure. The Athenians shift in their neat lines - silent, unreadable.

And then they charge.

The approach is artless, but their formation is tight in the ways that matter. At Brasidas's shout, a volley of javelins glances noisily off the Athenian shield wall. They brace against the impact, off balance for a heart-stopping moment.

He watches them: how they react, how they recover. They lift up, in rolling waves like a great metal centipede, and advance.

Again, he says.

Behind their lizardskin of locked shields, the helots shuffle more javelins to the front. A second volley, and a third, and then the men ladder together to prepare for the push -

There: a falter. A lurching blue-and-white ripple where the phalanx wavers, tries to surge forward when their wall is tested. These are the weak ones, the excitable ones, and they are on the left.

Brasidas divides his column in two with a sharp gesture of his spear and thunders _elpis_ , a word that in their battle-code means "false retreat." The left flank of his army recedes as a morning tide being sucked from the shore, and half of the Athenian phalanx follows, as if pulled by an invisible string, whooping in triumph and battle-lust -

Such arrogance, Brasidas thinks with pride, to believe you have made Sparta retreat!

The Athenian trierarch is screaming, shredding his voice in warning as he tries to control his men, but it's too late. His formation is stretching and dissolving. His soldiers are panicking, scrambling to fill the space left by their charging comrades. The blue and pink of armor and flesh shows through a yawning gap in the mosaic of their shields.

Brasidas brings the left flank back around, forms his men into a wickedly sharp pick, and chisels through the hole.

It is known throughout Hellas that once a Spartan phalanx has broken your line, you are done. The best you can do - infiltrated, gnawed through by hoplites feasting inside you like piranhas, eating your guts with spear and sword - is drop your shield so you can run faster.

The beach is choked with Athenian bodies. They are buckling like a rotting scaffold - not just the foremost phalanx but the one behind it, and the half-column behind that, as they see the bronze and bones and feeding frenzy of crimson capes on bloody flesh. They are in disarray. Screaming above the swell of the surf, they cast aside their weapons and throw themselves back into the sea towards their boats where Spartan spearmen chase them down and crush their skulls into the tide.

When the morning has passed, Brasidas stands on red sand with his shield on his back and his helmet tucked neatly under one arm. The winter sun and chilly ocean wind are a pleasant companion as he watches the queasy bob of the triremes - looking appalled, somehow, as if the vessels themselves are numb with shock at their sudden emptiness.

Methone is defended. Sparta has suffered no casualties.

The Athenians leave their dead, turn around, and go home.

* * *

A/N: future updates for this will be on AO3 only: /works/16587014/chapters/38871440


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